


Bombs and Satellites

by eleutheria_has_won



Series: spaceman [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Character Study, Commander Iverson Is Not Having A Good Day, Depression, Gen, POV Outsider, Queer Themes, Tags will change as I write more of this, everyone's queer in the future!, only that is not really the focus of this story sorry, this story is like hella genfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-21
Updated: 2016-09-22
Packaged: 2018-08-16 11:25:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8100631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleutheria_has_won/pseuds/eleutheria_has_won
Summary: While you're off saving the universe, there's some people who might be thinking about you.





	1. it started with a low light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fialleril](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fialleril/gifts).



> So, Fialleril, I finished season 1. And then this happened.
> 
> Also, this is the first thing I've posted since December of last year, and it's Voltron? Damn, self, what the hell are you doing.

In the summer of 2123, the world – or more accurately, the Galaxy Garrison – sends off a scientific mission to Kereberos. The potential data is exciting, as is the pushing of boundaries on human exploration, but while it's a _significant event_ in the sense that the newsfeeds all mention it, it's not so much a significant event in the lives of most average citizens. It's more of a talking point, a current events bit. Only to the scientists, the Garrison commanders, and the families does this mission count for more than a 15-minutes-mention.

In the autumn, the world – the whole world – mourns the loss of the Kereberos mission and all crew members, which went down due to (assumed) pilot error. Takashi Shirogane's grandmother weeps ugly, bitter tears over her rosary, praying in native Portuguese for her grandson's lost soul. His mother prays without weeping. Her heart feels like stone, and stone doesn't cry. Some part of her rebels, violently, at the idea that her son's mistake killed three people, including himself. Her son is – was – (still is) an excellent and intuitive pilot, all his instructors said so. What's more, he was dutiful, conscious of the burden that rested in a pilot's steady hands, and he was smart. He would not have made a stupid mistake. He would have known his limits. Not her son. Never her Shiro.

The other half of her prays that whatever heaven or purgatory her son is in now, he doesn't blame himself. It wouldn't have been his fault, she thinks, please, he has to know that. He couldn't have stopped it. And in no just world, she thinks, would her son end up in hell.

The aunts, the uncles, the cousins, and the neighbors mourn the loss and bring his family food in mute offering to the boy – the man – who was kind and good and made his mother smile. He was a good man. They honor him. They all go to his funeral, and his littlest cousins cry.

Meanwhile, two (entirely different) women have just had their world destroyed. Father and brother, husband and son, just – _gone._ No warning. Hope and pride, turned to blood and ash in their mouths. Katie, who is just 13 years old, is heartbroken for about two minutes before she transmutes that into being _furious_. How could this happen?! How _dare_ this happen?! Who thought it'd be fucking funny to take her dad & her big brother, all at once? Not allowed! Not happening! It's two days _before_ the official funeral that she first tries hacking into the remote images of Kereberos, looking for the crash. (It'll be two months before she succeeds.)

The official funeral is solemn, and also broadcast on newsfeeds around the world. There are salutes, and speeches about lives lost in the course of human advancement. Takashi Shirogane's delegation is massive, every single relative down to tiny cousin Ana Luiza who is five, standing there with wet eyes and unhappy faces. Sam and Matt Holt only get two: the wife and the sister. The former cries throughout the whole thing. The latter is stone-faced, and her eyes are dry, red instead with fury. Commander Iverson, who trained both of the younger crew members and worked extensively with Dr. Holt the elder, stands up to give a speech. Whatever else he does, he is a very good actor, and he doesn't have to act. He genuinely grieves. But it isn't enough. Katie looks up at his weary, crag-worn face and thinks, _This man. He knows something._

Because while the world and the families grieve, the commanders and the scientists pore over the salvaged data and wonder, and worry. Something has happened. And it wasn't pilot error.

(In his secret heart-of-hearts, Commander Iverson took off his beret and put it against his chest in shame the moment “pilot error” was suggested as an acceptable explanation for the public at large. Takashi Shirogane is one of the finest he's ever trained, and one of the best human beings he's ever known. “Pilot error” was one of the few _actual_ explanations that they _never_ considered. Not for long)

They don't know much, but they know they don't know what actually happened, and that every answer they come up with ends up refuted by the data. They can't find the crash. In fact, they actually find the work site that was in use the day the mission lost contact. There are footprints in the ice. There are too many footprints, for what they were doing.

But what can they do? What can _any_ of them do?

( _Well_ , Katie/Pidge thinks, rolling up her sleeves and getting ready to make her first break-in attempt at the Galaxy Garrison training center offices. _I can do this._ )

 


	2. It left a strange impression in my

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. I encountered a bit of a dilemma here. Because, like, was anyone wondering where Mama Holt was???? In all the "btw Katie's hacking the NASA-military, she's been officially banned from all their properties," like, where was the legal guardian here? She was 13 years old, ffs, where the hell is her mom. Because like, I don't know if you've noticed, but the Holt family is all SCARY AMOUNTS of smart. Like, Katie/Pidge is a terrifyingly smart 14 year old, Dr. Sam Holt is clearly a renowned genius, and Matt Holt was smart and accomplished enough as a kid in his late teens/early twenties to be included on a GROUND BREAKING SCIENTIFIC SPACE VOYAGE TO A MOON OF PLUTO. Like, clearly this was not on a whim.
> 
> So it stands to reason that the fourth Holt is also scary smart. She wouldn't just not notice her only (remaining) child getting up to the things that Katie/Pidge was very clearly getting up to.
> 
> So, meet Dr. Amanda Holt, PhD. She's...she's having a rough time. There's a reason that Katie/Pidge was mostly unsupervised for a full year.

Amanda Holt steps into a dim and silent house after a funeral and is abruptly, deathlessly exhausted. There is no light or laughter here. There might never be again.

“Katie,” she says, loose hands dropping her purse on the sofa cushions, the thump like the fall of a head from the guillotine to her reeling mind. “If – if you're hungry. I can make something.” She's not quite sure what to do. The mundanity of it burns her. It all feels too normal – it's not right. Her husband is dead, her son is dead – things shouldn't ever be normal again.

Katie, a pale and red-eyed waif in her black dress, stops and looks at her. She's very still. Her eyes are bright in the gloom. “No,” she says slowly. “I...” She's so young, but her eyes already see more than a 13-year-old should. Just like her father's, but she's not a microbiologist in the lab. “No, that's okay, Mom,” says Katie quietly, “I'm not hungry. You can...get some rest.”

“Oh,” Amanda Holt rasps. “Okay.”

Amanda Holt's knees give out. She hits the sofa like a dropped watermelon hits pavement, in that she shatters on impact. It is silent, and impossibly final. All her muscles have been disconnected, and her joints have been unlocked. She barely notices Katie moving away up the stairs. Unkind hands have come and unraveled her spine; her sinews are splayed out and frayed to breaking. Tar wells in her mind, thick and black and choking. The tide rises and it takes her.

Though she doesn't know it, this is also the last time her daughter is completely honest with her.

Amanda Holt looses the next three months to depression. The university gives her time off to mourn her family's loss, and on the day she's supposed to return to work, she can't even get out of bed. The phone rings a couple times, and then doesn't anymore. Sometimes she can get up and eat something. She stumbles to the kitchen, and puts her hands in the fridge, and puts whatever she finds in her mouth with shaking hands. Sometimes she can't, and then she doesn't eat for a while. Or else, she wakes up, and there's crackers and juice on the side table, or soup, or microwave ramen. She'll eat it, or she won't. It depends on the day.

Everything passes by, and all of it is grey.

She'd gone through a period of depression in college, stumbled between classes like walking wounded. A few good friends had talked her into seeing a doctor, and making contact with her increasingly worried and confused parents. She'd gotten a therapist, gone through neurochemical mapping to find the misfiring chemoreceptors and over- or under-produced neurotransmitters, and received medicine that would correct the unbalanced serotonin and dopamine levels. It was a big part of what had persuaded her to go into biology in the first place, and it had been in the biomedical program at New Ithaca University that she'd met Samuel.

These are the thoughts she has in between drowning in the tar swamp of her own head.

She also has another thought. _It's worse this time_ , she approximates hazily, _than it was in college._

_Much, much worse._

She thinks about meeting Sam, her Sam. She thinks about what his last moments might have been like. She stops thinking, and drowns.

Eventually, the tar recedes enough that Amanda can think about things. She muses about food, and forgets about it, after a while. Same for work, and standing up, and leaving her bed for the first time in weeks. It all kind of passes her by like a dream. The first thing she remembers and sticks on is biology, and neurotransmitters, and misfiring brain cells caused by stress and genetic predisposition. She's a biologist by trade, and she's familiar with the vagaries to which a body and brain can subject you. She'd gone through it in college, and it had guided her into her field of study.

She hasn't thought about all that in relation to her in decades, though. After, oh, five or six years on the pills, her neurotransmitters had thankfully stabilized again, and her doctor had cleared her to stop taking the synthesized versions. The doctor – the same one that had first seen her back in college – had warned her that there was always the possibility of destabilization in the future, after a significant shock or hormonal change, and she should always keep some pills on hand just in case, like an asthmatic should carry an inhaler even years after their last attack. But after a decade and two pregnancies without so much as a minor scare, she'd stopped worrying. She'd stopped thinking about it.

But she'd kept the pills.

The significance doesn't strike her for a while. She drifts in the gray, and the tar swamp in her head, and the emptiness.

But the thing is, Katie is brilliant and she is determined. Her father, now, he was brilliant, yes, and he pursued his dreams with passion and energy, but it was from her mother that Katie Holt got her spine of steel. And even with her steel spine broken, Amanda Holt is still a survivor.

It is a herculean effort as vast and grand as any battle cry for Amanda Holt to roll over in bed. It is doubly so for her to reach for the drawer in the side table, and fumble until she finds the dusty bottle. Opening the lid feels nigh impossible. But she does it, she does all this, and she swallows two of the pills inside dry, and she sags against the bed like all her strings are cut, again.

But she has begun to fight.

  


After her mom is taken to the hospital and starts getting treatment, Katie is sent to live with her first-cousin-once-removed and his family. They're the closest living relatives she has at this point, and while they're kind enough, they are also really, really easy to fool. She can convincingly pass off her roiling anger, which tightens her knuckles white and grinds her teeth, as grief, and her intense bouts of concentration as introverted misery. She plays the role of the 13-year-old girl lost in mourning her dead dad and brother well enough that they leave her alone, unsure what to do with her. (There's maybe not all that much acting going on there. But no, no, she's not falling apart, she's _angry_ , she's going to find the _truth._ )

Hacking into the Galaxy Garrison is a complicated endeavor, made a little more complicated by the fact that she doesn't actually know all that much about hacking. I mean, programming, yes, she knows how to do that, but hacking is a very different proposition, and she reinvents the wheel a _lot_ while trying to figure out how it works. She'd been trying the whole time that her mom was staring into space and not getting out of bed (she'd forged a letter withdrawing herself from school and gotten her mom to sign and send it during one of her semi-lucid periods) and she's still trying, even when her mom gets up and calls a doctor and Katie's packed off to the next town over. It takes months of trying to get anywhere, and even then, all she manages to figure out is that yes, there is still a lot more chatter about Kereberos in the Garrison's upper command than there should be if everything was on the level, and yes, she will not be able to get into the system and actually figure out what that chatter is from here, she needs an internal terminal.

She's almost thankful, in an abstract and guilty-ish way, that her mother isn't here for this. (Okay, it's seriously awful, she's probably the most horrible person and daughter ever, but it's not like her mom is – is _gone_ , she's just getting treatment, it's fine. She's fine. She has to do this.) If her mom was still around, and in any kind of mind that noticed her surroundings, Katie would've been caught out immediately, She'd never have gotten away with some of the things she gets away with in her cousin's house.

Like, say, sneaking out to hot-wire a hover speeder (a process she'd looked up online) and flying hundreds of miles to the nearest Garrison base so she can break into a shady Commander's office and look up the pictures they've taken of Kereberos.

Which, yes, she understands that that was maybe not the best idea. Was it illegal? Yes. Was it an act of treason? Also probably yes. Was it worth it? Well, yes, except for the part where she's now banned from all Garrison installations. That might make getting new information on Kereberos a bit more difficult. But at least now she knows that Garrison high command is just as lost as she is, which is... something.

(A very scary something.)

Since they don't know what going on, and so far it seems like they're not really going to, her best bet for finding out what happened to her dad and Matt is to, well ...figure it out herself. Which, since she is _not_ the one with the satellites and what not to gather information from, means that she's going to need to find a way to infiltrate the Galaxy Garrison – _again_ – this time on a more _permanent_ basis – in order to tap their satellite feeds and start figuring out what the hell.

(Oh, geez, if she gives herself even two seconds to really think about this...? She's _boned._ )

  


They've taken satellite images. They've sent probes. Hell, they actually constructed and launched a secret satellite to orbit Kereberos itself, and that was not a cheap or easy endeavor. But the Galaxy Garrison and its scientists and officers are no closer to understanding what happened to the Kereberos mission than they were the moment they realized the mission was lost.

It has shoved lit fire-crackers under some very highly-ranked chairs, to say the least.

More importantly, it has put dread into some important minds and hearts. Commander Iverson has been in those meetings. He knows that deep and abiding dread. Their technology is very good. There should be no threat that they don't know about and can't detect, that would wipe out a crew of very well-trained and experienced Garrison scientists and pilot. But there was no storm, no seismic activity evident. The ice-coring tripod wasn't even scratched, let alone destroyed. They have no idea what happened. Which means, that if they send out any new missions, it might happen again. They don't know.

It might happen here.

Science advances by leaps and bounds in that one year, actually. Garrison engineers are working frantically, day and night. Mostly in the area of interplanetary radar, life support systems, and scanners than can see anomalies coming a star system away.

  


Getting herself into the Galaxy Garrison academy is one thing.

Create an entire legal identity complete enough to pass a Garrison background check is a _very different thing._ Seeing as she, you know, isn't technically allowed on Garrison property anymore. So obviously, Katie's not going as herself.

It's a whole mess of hacking into just about every government database that exists and a few that don't. She ends up taking a shortcut and deciding to co-opt a preexisting identity, out of the database of deceased citizen records. She can take apart bits and pieces of the old records, put them together into someone new. She can't have a family in her new identity, because it's not like she'll be able to bribe her cousin and his family into pretending or anything. Foster kid it is. Make up a history of jumping around, try not to create a living situation where anyone would have strong memories of her (ones that, if questions are asked, would reveal her new identity to be faked electronically), make up schools, test scores... She'll make it work.

Then there's the matter of how to disguise herself. She toys with the idea of hair dye, tanning salons, so on and so forth, but all of those things require repeated application, and she has no idea how long she's going to be at the academy before she can figure out what's going on. And in so far as she knows, most cadets aren't allowed off academy grounds for biweekly disguise renewal. So it has to be something easy and permanent.

The day she realizes she's going to have to pass for a boy in order to go to the local academy, rather than the girls' academy halfway around the planet or the nonbinary academy which is still 5 hours away at best, she groans so loudly that her cousin's husband knocks on the door and asks delicately if she's okay, clearly concerned and confused in equal measure.

“I'm fine!” she shouts back. “It's... uh... uterus problems!”

(Which, _crap_ , how is she going to handle _that?_ Most trans-boys her age have already gotten the hormone sequence which shuts down the menstrual cycle, so it's not like she'll even have a good excuse. Looks like it's time to hack a pharmaceutical company and order quadruple the usual amount of progesterone pills.)

“Okay,” he says slowly. “Holler if you need anything, okay?”

“Sure!” she says, already turning back to her hacking.

But for whatever reason, she's absolutely sure that it needs to be _that specific_ academy she goes to, and she's not sure why. Maybe because it's the closest one. Maybe because it's the one where Commander Iverson, who is definitely in the know, lives and works – though that's also kind of one in the con-column, too, considering that he knows her face _way_ too well for comfort. Maybe because it's the one Matt went to.

They're all valid reasons, and none of them feel right.

She just knows she has to go.

So she does.

She makes it work.

  


(Shiro's mom, his grandmother, his family, they're still doing fine. They're mourning. But they're not falling apart. Their world is not chaos.)

  


(Yet.)

  


On the first day of school, it goes like this:

Pidge Gunderson, foster kid, here on a merit-based scholarship, shows up to the Academy on the bus, alone. He walks through the doors, glances carefully at his map, and then starts shuffling through the crowd toward the dormitories to sign in. (Katie Holt's cousin and his husband are under the impression that she's gone away to boarding school. Which, technically, she has. Just. Not the one they thought. And not as herself.)

Just across the lobby, a lanky Hispanic boy scuffs his foot awkwardly, accompanied by his mom and a couple of his younger siblings. His mom dresses him down in rapid Spanish, and then hugs him firmly and sends him onward.

Meanwhile, a brawny Polynesian boy with a kind face has already started to unpack. His moms and dad dropped him off hours ago. Their goodbye was brief, but not unloving. They just aren't a super demonstrative family, overall.

(The boy in the desert is alone.)

  


For the ranking and in-the-know officers at the Galaxy Garrison, the loss of the Kereberos mission was the event that started the piling up of powder kegs. Pour on the gasoline of dread, the napalm of paranoia, and the fireworks of a literal pseudo-governmental conspiracy just _waiting_ to be blown open by a very determined 14-year-old hacker/infiltrator, and...

By the time an alien vessel crashes into the desert and one of their own is the stumbling pilot who emerges, everything's pretty well ripe for some pyrotechnics.

(They've been freaking the fuck out for an entire year, now. No _wonder_ they were more ready to sedate Shiro than to listen to him.)

The entire incident is one big clusterfuck. I mean, _absolute_ FUBAR screw-up, the kind that sinks careers by the dozen, the kind that just has every single officer putting their hands either over their face or flung up in the air. There's no coming back from this one, guys, we are SOL forever. Three students and one former student just took off on an over-max-load commercial hoverbike, with our prisoner and/or recovered soldier in tow (they were still kind of figuring that one out? Given the crazy ranting and scary metal arm but also the very real and legitimate alien spaceship that maybe meant he wasn't all that crazy) – and _they got away_. From our _well-trained, professional pilot-instructors_ who were driving their _technologically superior and federally funded vehicles._ Like, damn, someone definitely got super, super fired over that one. This was not a small whoopsie.

And yeah, there's no way they're keeping this one out of the public eye. Just about every minor space agency with a half-decent radar, university telescope on this hemisphere, and casual observer in a hundred kilometer radius saw the _alien space ship_ come screaming out of the sky and crash land in the desert surrounding the Galaxy Garrison. There is video on the internet. Granted, it's shaky video, and everyone is pretty sure it's a hoax, if they even know about it. But there's a pretty significant portion of the population who's heard about it, and there's definitely some public curiosity happening.

Commander Iverson just sends up a thankful, miserable prayer in the middle of damage control hour 6, that at least it happened at night, and most potential eyewitnesses were asleep. It could have been so much worse if those things weren't true.

Literally the next day, Commander Iverson is realizing that someone, somewhere, hates him. Personally, and specifically, hates him. There is no other explanation for the _flying blue lion_ (what?) doing loop-de-loops (what??) in the middle of broad daylight, in perfect view of all the rubberneckers who heard about or witnessed the crash landing last night and came back to see what else they could see, usually carrying things like cameras. (Dammit.)

Fuck this, he's never being thankful for not-worst case scenarios ever again.

Iverson stamps away from the sight away the lion in the sky (why a lion?) swearing violently, and promises himself a stiff drink at the end of the day. He's already queuing up holo-calls with 90% of Garrison high command already. He has work to do. This is absolute bullshit and he was not trained for this, but that doesn't mean that that non-regulation shit isn't about to hit the industrial fans.

He hates this already.

(Just you wait, Commander Iverson, just you wait. Your week is going to get a whole lot worse than it is. Because, you see, in about 28 hours, your students' families are going to figure out that their children are missing. And in 29 hours, so is the whole world.)


End file.
